"The main thing is this—when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning" ~Grace Paley

Visceral Self: Writing Through the Body: Week Six Heart Chakra | Heart, little heart, beat softly

Visceral Self: Writing Through the Body & other events below (manage/upgrade here to join!). All Zoom links emailed day of events.

📝 Fri May 17, SPECIAL FREE in-person and hybrid narrative health event at U of MN: Planting Seeds of Radical Hope Symposium (FREE, in person and virtual, Jeannine leads one of the collaborative writing sessions)

🗓️ Thurs, May 23, Noon-1 PM Silent Co-Write on Zoom (paid)

🕯️Wed June 12, 8 PM CT, Candlelight Yoga Nidra (founding)

🕯️Fri June 21, 1 PM CT, Celebratory Live Solstice Salon w/open mic (founding)

Three reminders before we jump in!

1. If you missed last week’s discussion/breakdown of the magic of close reading (as Annie Proulx said, “writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write”) you can find that post here—many of you said it was super helpful and that now you feel braver about contributing to the close read convo in our comments, and I’m so glad to hear it! I get into a few more details on methods, including the beauty and necessity of differing viewpoints!, later in today’s post.

2. Also, speaking of embodied writing, if you didn’t catch yesterday’s Lit Salon post, I Want You to Write About Sex, it’s definitely apropos to our work here, and contains at least a half dozen published examples, fiction & memoir, of various ways to write into and about our experience of living as sexual beings, including when we’re not having any sex or don’t even want to. You can find that post here.

3. For anyone who is new here, yes, yes, yes, you absolutely can jump into this embodied writing intensive right now if you like, and start where we are, it is not too late, it is never too late, and you can read the posts in any order you like and do the writing exercises in any order or not at all, it’s absolutely a choose your own adventure! You’ll be warmly welcomed and we’ll all be glad you’re here, full stop.

“The main thing is this—when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.... Say anything, but be respectful. Say—maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember." ~ Grace Paley’s "My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age.”

I need this reminder from the brilliant Grace Paley often. Maybe you do, too. I’ve needed it even more often the older I get, it seems, and especially these last couple of years.

You see, back when the COVID-19 pandemic still had most of us very confused and stunned—sometime in 2021—my youngest adult child got the idea to get licensed to do foster care.

That kid of mine’s name

Billie Oh

, and Billie is, like me, is a writer and, also like me, a certified yoga teacher. Billie helps with Writing in the Dark and has been partnering with me in our current Visceral Self intensive for embodied writing, offering audio meditations, video instruction on yin yoga poses, play lists for writing, and more.

But that’s not what I’m writing about today, or why I’m re-introducing Billie. Today I am writing about the heart, and how Billie and their foster son Z have been doing their work on mine, making it far more fragile but also more fierce, more broken yet also bigger and sturdier, and ultimately more whole even in its new, constantly cracking way.

I too have been a foster parent—I provided care for a number of children from infants through teens back in the 1990s. But the motivation for Billie to get licensed in 2021 seemed more urgent and specific than it had felt for me. I supposed I did it mostly because I’d been a foster child, and had endured bad foster care, so it seemed somehow inevitable that I would myself try to do better at some point for some kids who weren’t me.

For Billie, the urge came partly from the pandemic and the injustices it amplified, which they had witnessed firsthand in their full-time work in a crisis nursery during the onset and through the height of lockdown. They also went through a lot of personal transformation during that time, including relationship transitions (in other words, they got single), and that, too, gave them pause to think about how they wanted to show up in the world, and what they might be particularly well suited to give. With their genuine love of kids and background in child development, foster care made sense to them.

In 2022, Billie got the call, their first placement opportunity, and a few days later, Z blasted into our lives. I suppose it goes well with the story to say that I had Covid at the time. It was August. It was hot and humid. Z was 20 months old and very scared and mad and sad. He was also strong and fast and nimble. Friends, he was only 20 months but could run (fast!) and jump and climb stairs foot over foot just like a big kid.

This is all to say, Z took us by storm in all the ways you can imagine and then some. In the almost two years he’s been with our family, as Z’s case evolved from foster care to an adoption (now in process), he has taught me more than anyone else ever has about love and loss and accepting complexity and uncertainty and the miracle and hardship of living in a human body and navigating our place in the “family of things” (and everything that phrase means) in this hard but still beautiful world.

So today, as we begin to think about our heart chakras—and how softening into that chakra, feeling it, listening to it, and seeing ourselves act from it, can enliven our writing in untold ways—I want to tell you a little heart story about Z, and his heart.

From there, we’ll read a poem of the heart together, a strange, lovely poem about lying in the backseat on the road north of Tampico, and we’ll talk about that poem together in all the detailed ways we can so that we can wring from it every bit of wisdom it has to offer, both on living and on writing.

Also, a heart chakra meditation, a yin yoga pose to open the heart, an affirmation, and a structured writing exercise built specifically to connect us just a little more, maybe the slightest bit more, to that soft drumming source inside.

Here’s the little heart story about Z. I hope you like it.

It’s simple, really, the story of Z’s heart, just like it’s simple, too, the bigger story of what all of our hearts do. Our hearts beat to pump the blood from here to there, the blood that keeps us alive. Our hearts just do the same thing all day and night, tucked in there behind our ribs, pumping, pumping.

But of course, it’s complicated, too. Sometimes our hearts race. Z’s heart, it races. It races like mine, for reasons not right now, reasons out of reach. My heart knows Z’s heart. His heart knows mine. Our hearts know each other.

So when I asked Billie recently—in the kind of casual but never actually casual way I do at least once a day—how Z slept, I was so moved by their answer. My heart, it was so moved by what they said.